


Upon The Children

by GulJeri



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5710246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulJeri/pseuds/GulJeri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garak is being born, and Tain considers what he is to do with this bastard child. He considers the childs heritage, flashing back to when his father brought Mila and Tolan home with them as servants after a young Tain and his father went to visit the mountains. Tain wonders if he can take this child bred of a lowly servant and former Karubdan, and make him into his protege. In short; a sows ear into a silk purse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upon The Children

**Author's Note:**

> Dislaimer--the Karubda are not mine. Here is more info about them: http://stexpanded.wikia.com/wiki/Kurabda

_The_ _sins of the father_ _are to be laid upon the children._

Enabran Tain sat calmly in his study, stroking the ears of his most favored riding hound. He was watching Tolan Garak, the fool, who was seated on the floor in a meditative posture, wearing a very old, very ragged, _ruviyal_ , which was a type of traditional robe. Tolan’s face was hidden behind his prayer mask. He was chanting in broken pieces of Hebitian. The language was nearly dead, and what few stoic (or idiotic) followers of the ancient religion remained tended to meet underground, in hiding, like nasty little voles piling into a subterranean nest. Tain disliked Tolan’s superstitions, and on normal occasions would not allow it in his home, but this wasn’t a normal occasion.

Tain held a tumbler of kanar in his other hand, and lifted it to take a long drink.

Today his bastard son was to be born, and today Enabran Tain would decide what to do with him.

From the other room, Mila let out a wail. Tain had called a midwife to the house. Mila and Tolan never would have been able to afford to birth at the hospital. The midwife was with Mila now as she laid.

Tain took another sip of his kanar, relishing the slow burn.

Mila and Tolan Garak had come from the mountainous regions of Cardassia Prime. Tain remembered when his father had taken him on a trip to the mountains as a young boy. They’d visited the mountains that edged the furthest reaches of the Hăzăk region, which had been hit hardest by climate change, back when Hebitia had been gasping its last dying breath, and Cardassia had been crowning with growing pangs of labor.

Tain had enjoyed the look of the mountains, but he hadn’t been built to hike them, and neither had his father. They were desert people, not built for navigating craggy terrain, and their wealth and status had allowed them to keep fed when millions of Cardassians had been starving on the streets—father and son had both been _quite_ well fed.

They had stayed the night in tiny village nestled in the foothills of the mountains. It was really nothing more than a small huddle of shacks, and sad looking land which the people were still trying to farm. Tain’s father had paid a family of four in order to use their ‘home’ as a place to sleep for the night. The father who had three children to raise on his own, gratefully took the money, and he and his children, one of whom was quite sick, spent the night huddled together sleeping beneath the stars.

When morning had come the man was found sitting in the dirt, weeping over his dead child. The older two children had stood nearby, holding hands, and staying silent. The man had paused in his weeping, and looked up to Tain’s father.

“Please, you are wealthy, _ah'tekel._ You have good food, take them,” the man spoke in a broken, almost vanished, dialect called Kurabda, “they will die here, like their mother, and now their brother—my little Saa’met,” the man said.

“Strange that a Kurabda should be living near the mountains, and in houses built of stone rather than animal-skin tents. The Kurabda are nomads… a backward, superstitious people, who wander the deserts chanting Hebitian rubbish. But you seem to have settled here,” Tain’s father had said.

A dark look had passed over the mans eyes.

“A small sect broke from the group very long ago, decided it would be better to raise our families in one spot. We broke with tradition, and for that we have been punished. Most of us are dead,” the man held the tiny Saa’met close to his chest, and rocked him gently, “my eldest son, Tol’anaaf, and my daughter, Hraamila. They can be good servants to you. The children need not suffer the mistakes of the father…”

“They’re scrawny, probably ill, and there are enough orphans running the streets of Cardassian cities. If I wished for more children,” Tain’s father said, briefly resting his hand on the back of young Enabran’s neck, “I could take my pick. But… your daughter is beautiful…”

The girl hugged closer to her brother, suddenly afraid.

“She is not of age…” the man said, though it was not something that needed to be stated at all. The fact was obvious just by looking at her. She hadn’t formed breasts, or hips, and her chufa was as pale and colorless as a boys.

“Then… I’ll leave them with you,” Tain’s father said, a slow, dark, grin twisting his lips.

The children had come home with them.

Upon arriving home they’d been stripped naked of their traditional Kurabdan clothing, and Tain’s father had given the garments to him, and instructed him to throw them into the fire. The brother and sister both wore their hair in the Kurabdan tradition, long, with a few braids that had string woven in, string that was dirty, dull, and dingy, but which had once likely been bright as the catch of the sun on a drop of rain.

The girl had been allowed to keep her hair, though it had been thoroughly washed, and neatly braided. The boy’s long, beautiful, hair had been hacked off into the short chop that was worn by most Cardassian males. That too was tossed into the fire.

Even their names had been taken, rendered from the useless, dying, Kurabda language, into names that sounded more Cardassian and less archaic and backward. Tol’anaaf became Tolan, Hraamila was shortened to ‘Mila’. They were allowed to keep their surname of ‘Garak’, and the boy had been allowed to keep the old prayer mask that his father had shoved into his hands before they’d been taken away to the city.

“You’re a fool, Tolan,” Tain said, finishing off his kanar, “don’t you remember what that dirty old mask, and those useless chants, have done for you in the past? I should have taken the initiative when I was a boy, and tossed that into the fire, along with the rest of your Hebitian nonsense.”

Mila’s wail of pain came again.

Tolan said nothing. He had held fast to the old ways, while Mila had moved on, and made the best of her life as a Cardassian, and servant of the house of Tain. Remaining in silence rather than rising to the bait of an aggressor was Kurabdan practice, which stemmed from the Hebitian teachings of Oralius. The only exception to that rule pertained to rituals revolving around courtship and mating, in which aggression, quarreling, and even minor insults between two interested parties, were encouraged. Interestingly enough, Cardassians tended to holdover with that tradition, whether they liked to admit to it or not.

In the silence Tain refilled his tumbler and swirled the kanar. It came in many varieties, though the one he’d poured for himself upon that night was a deep red color, and used to celebrate birth, as it was the color of ‘new blood’. Whatever this child turned out to be, it was true that he was ‘new blood’ but only time would tell if his birth was actually worth celebrating.

So far the child was more trouble than he was worth. In most cases in Cardassia it wasn’t culturally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy, and though Tain had very ‘flexible’ morals, on this topic he had refused to budge. Sticking to that particular belief was probably a bad idea. His father had been smarter. Mila had become pregnant by Tain’s father several times when she’d been quite young. Each time the family doctor had paid a special visit to the house, and ‘taken care’ of it.

In a way it was Tain’s curiosity that pressured him to keep the child, in another it was his arrogance, but both amounted to the same thing; it was _his_ child, and he wanted it because it was his. He had no paternal feelings, in fact he was somewhat disgusted at the mixture of his own blood with that of these servants, whose lineage came from the Kurabda tribes. But he supposed he could make this child better, despite his poor blood, there was still Cardassian blood in him—Tain’s blood. In a way, the child would be an interesting experiment. Tain needed a child, a protégé, to train and build to ward off his enemies when he himself was too old to continue, to take his place as head of the Order, to continue on in his footsteps. If he molded the child well, his poor blood wouldn’t matter.

He sat the still-full tumbler of kanar down onto the mantelpiece and looked up as the midwife brought a bundle out in her arms. Wrapped in a fresh white blanket was a large, leathery, pouch—it was actually an egg. There were still some messy jelly-like bits clinging to it, and the leathery surface bulged here or moved there as the child inside moved and squirmed.

“She carried this egg for a very long incubation period,” Tain said, “how long, do you think, before it hatches?”

Pregnancy and delivery was never the same between two Cardassian women. Some laid very soon, and then the child would spend months maturing in the egg before hatch-day. Others would carry the egg inside for the largest part of the year, finally lay, and then within the same day the hatch would happen.

“Very soon, probably today,” the midwife said, “see how the child moves? He is trying to work his way out. Do you have a nesting crib?”

Tolan had risen from his prayer by then and had come over to see the egg.

“Mila is well?” he asked.

Tain disliked hearing the man speak. Tolan had never been defiant, even as a child, he had been compliant to most demands—even such things as learning to speak ‘proper’ Cardăsda, though he kept an odd sort of accent. Mila had learned to drop even that, and Tain often wondered if the accent was Tolan’s way of quietly defying Tain, and his father, all of these years.

At least the man was a very good gardener.

“She is well,” the midwife said.

“Thank Oralius for that,” Tolan said.

“You heard the woman,” Tain said firmly, “go get the nesting crib.”

Tolan did as asked, and returned pushing a small thing that looked like a cart with a concave top, like a large bowl. The egg was placed into that, and with the push of a button, a forcefield activated around it. The forcefield generated heat to keep the egg warm, and also provided a sort of ‘fence’ so that the egg couldn’t topple out of the nest, no matter how aggressive the hatchling became in his attempts to get out into the world.

Tolan and Tain sat watch into the night. Around midnight a small opening appeared in the egg. Gradually it worked wider, and wider, until near dawn it was big enough for the childs’ head to poke through, and the hatchling squirmed out, and began to cry.

Tolan lowered the forcefield and carefully pulled the child into his arms, grinning down at the slime-covered hatchling with happiness, and pride. The dewclaw in the center of the hatchling’s small chufa was quite loose now that it had done its job of scraping the leathery eggshell open. Tolan carefully worked it a time or two until it fell off into his hand.

Tain stood nearby as Tolan made gentle ‘shushing’ sounds to the hatchling.

“Mila wishes to call him after our brother,” Tolan said.

Tain shook his head.

“He won’t have a Kurabdan name, not even an acceptable bastardization of a Kurabdan name. Cardassians tend to name their sons after their fathers, often using a name with the same beginning letter. He’s my son—and he’s to be called ‘Elim’,” Tain said.

Tolan’s nostrils flared, an obvious sign that he disliked the fact that his sister could not even chose her sons name, but that was as far as Tolan’s irritation would take him. He nodded.

“Wouldn’t you like to hold him?” Tolan asked.

Once again, Tain shook his head.

“That’s not necessary,” he said, “take him to Mila. Wake her. He needs to feed. The two of you are tasked with making sure that my son grows up healthy, and strong. He’ll call you father, Tolan, but you will never forget… that the hatchling is mine. I have many things to teach him.”

Elim cried.


End file.
